A necromancer on the run from his past. A young woman brutally murdered as bait. A vengeful magician trying to cheat death. A Mexican demigoddess of death with her eye on the necromancer’s soul. Set it in the sorcerous underground of L.A. and you’ve got Dead Things, the follow-up to Stephen Blackmoore’s City of the Lost (which I reviewed here). Chased out of L.A. a dozen years ago, Eric Carter’s a necromantic mercenary, a spell-for-hire who’s put down a lot of bad men in that time. A disconnected phone rings for twenty minutes in his West Texas motel room. When he finally picks it up, it’s news of his sister’s murder. Defying the death sentence on his head should he return to L.A., Carter drives a dead man’s Cadillac back to his home town to find and punish the killers.

Dead Things is loosely set in the same version of L.A. that Blackmoore explored in City of the Lost. Carter’s been gone awhile and, as he asks about wizards he used to know, Blackmoore slips in a nod to the events of Lost. A certain devilish djinn turns up again, ready to help and hinder as before. Blackmoore paints L.A. as only a native son can. Off-the-cuff mentions of intersections and shorthand references to highway traffic give the story a lived-in feeling. The tone becomes uneasily anecdotal, like an old, blind barber’s anecdote as he gives you a straight razor shave. This feeling of hard-knuckled noir anchors the urban fantasy that drives Dead Things.

Blackmoore turns up the fantasy dial in this book. Eric Carter is a very talented prestidigitator, showing facility for both quick-draw lightning spells and elaborate rituals to speak with the dead. He tangles with spell-throwing mooks on several occasions. Little charms and wards abound in Dead Things. Even secondary characters are hustling for a little extra power. The doors to the magical underbelly of L.A. are thrown open. There are times, however, when it feels as though there’s a little too much magic in the air. The right spell is usually available to solve a problem, which drains a little momentum from some scenes. I would have liked to see magic fail Carter once or twice. Like City of the Lost, Dead Things draws on the detective story for its backbone. Unlike Lost, though, Dead Things’ story doesn’t feel as complex. There are fewer twists and reversals in Dead Things that we saw handled so well in Lost.

Blackmoore trades the labyrinthine plot of Lost for something equally interesting: character relationships. As Carter cautiously reconnects with his old L.A. life, an old flame reappears who is rightfully angry and resentful over Carter’s abrupt departure. In several moments between Carter and his old love, Blackmoore writes some honest scenes of wounded resentment and tentative reconciliation. Carter is a more developed character than Joe Sunday in City of the Lost. He struggles with the choices he’s made and his confidence falters. Carter’s ultimately more sympathetic, more human, resulting in a richer story. This is what Blackmoore does well, taking scenes, moments, and characters with familiar shapes and twisting them enough to make them satisfying. Including this soured relationship demonstrates that Blackmoore isn’t a one-trick pony. Using a Sin City analogy, Blackmoore showed us that he can write Marv, the sociopathic enforcer from The Hard Goodbye played by Mickey Rourke, and now he’s showing us his John Hartigan, the honorable cop from That Yellow Bastard played by Bruce Willis.

On top of it all, Dead Things retains the breakneck pace and excitement of City of the Lost. Blackmoore’s trying some new things, but not at the expense of the old. It’s loaded with interesting action sequences, wry one-liners, bravado, and gray morality. In the background of the story lurk a jealous demigoddess of death and a couple of surviving characters that we know we’ll see again. Carter ends the book in more trouble than he started it and I can’t wait to see how he gets out of it. There are eight million ghost stories in the naked city. This hopefully hasn’t been the last of them.

Your Google-fu need not be strong to find reviews of Django Unchained that use the word “pastiche”. In fact, you’ll get a similar number of results if you swap “Inglourious Basterds” for “DjangoUnchained” in that search. Kill Bill (both volumes), Jackie Brown, Pulp Fiction, you get the idea. “Pastiche” is a finely-balanced word. On its face, it’s simply the imitation of another’s artistic work. If you’re a fan of Kirby Ferguson (and I am), all artistic works are pastiche to some degree and that’s all right. Unlike an “homage” or “tribute”, pastiche is a bit slapdash, as if glued together from odds and ends. When it’s done right, pastiche is an enthusiastic, exuberant nod-and-wink to something or someone the filmmaker admires. Done wrong, it’s a lifeless exercise in massacring your favorite comedian’s jokes.

Not only does a successful pastiche hinge on a filmmaker’s awareness of his inspirations, it works best when the audience knows them, too. If we don’t know what the filmmaker is imitating, we may not even know it’s a pastiche at all. The more obscure the inspiration, the more the filmmaker risks losing the audience. Quentin Tarantino’s films usually run a high risk. He loves the cinematic backwaters, the lowbrow, obscure classics of blaxploitation, spaghetti westerns, and kung-fu. His favorite movies are If pastiche is an imitation of what you love, then only a real cinephile has a chance of appreciating Django Unchained. If you haven’t seen Mandingo (an obscure blaxploitation film about a Southern plantation) or the original Django (considered a classic spaghetti western), then you’re not in on the joke. Django Unchained becomes (and is) an “inside baseball” movie.

Tarantino’s arguably been in this same spot before. The standard line is that he makes pastiches of obscure B-movies that only video store clerks have ever seen. A high degree of difficulty, every time, but he overcomes it by making great movies. It’s fine if nearly all of your audience misses the camera move you swiped from some kung-fu flick if you’re telling a great story. He pulled off this trick with his two previous movies: Inglourious Basterds and Kill Bill. What’s disappointing about Django Unchained is seeing Tarantino stumble on a trick we thought he knew cold.

On a cold Texas night two years before the start of the Civil War, Django (a taciturn Jamie Foxx) and a line of slaves stumble in chains under the watch of three slavers. King Schultz, a German dentist turned bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz, still wearing Hans Landa’s demeanor), is searching for a trio of outlaws and Django can identify them. Schultz convinces Django to help find the outlaws, who separated Django from his wife, Broomhilda (a proud Kerry Washington). Once the outlaws are taken care of, Schultz offers Django a deal: assist with the winter’s bounty-hunting (for a cut of the rewards) and Schultz will help Django rescue Broomhilda come the spring. Django’s wife is now the property of a notorious plantation owner named Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio, the best part of this movie), who is known for staging brutal, deadly “mandingo” fights between unarmed slaves. The bounty hunters arrive at Candieland (the plantation) and must outwit both Calvin and his house slave, Stephen (Samuel Jackson doing his own pastiche), in order to claim Broomhilda. Being a revenge film – and a Quentin Tarantino revenge film to boot – Django Unchained’s finale is drenched in bloody, absurd, cartoonish violence.

This film isn’t a complete misfire by any stretch. Tarantino may have a taste for schlock, but his talent is unimpeachable. He delivers rich images of high-plains mountain valleys and humid Southern fields. Instead of a gout of blood when a man is shot, he cuts to a fine spray of blood drenching tufts of cotton in the field. Dizzying zooms and whip-pans, usually derided as an amateur’s gimmicks, become playful in Tarantino’s hands. He honors the camera’s rules before breaking them. One of the tropes of blaxploitation films is the use of funk, soul, and R&B on the soundtrack. Tarantino embraces and updates the blaxploitation soundtrack with a mix of hip-hop, Ennio Morricone, and, in a great sequence, Jim Croce’s “I Got A Name”. He knows how to shoot a fight, whether it’s with guns or fists. His unique knack for dialogue crops up in a few scenes. Django Unchained is unmistakably a Tarantino film.

The trouble is that there’s too much Tarantino in the film. Django Unchained is bloated and indulgent. Many scenes could be trimmed and tightened without losing any impact. Several scenes could be replaced with two lines of dialogue that would allow for better pacing. In fact, it’s often the dialogue that’s responsible for distending the shape of the film. Tarantino is rightly praised as a master of dialogue, but he’s not on his game in Django Unchained. Florid verbosity substitutes for his characteristic cleverness. It’s as though Tarantino knows that his audience expects verbal dexterity and mistakes pedantry for charm. Blind to this weakness, Tarantino allows his characters to ramble and bluster far longer than they should. Schultz suffers the most from this misstep, an error compounded by the inevitable comparison of Christoph Waltz as Schultz and as Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds. The same type of elaborate, formal dialogue that lends elegant menance to Hans Landa sounds officious and pompous in Schultz. The German bounty hunter becomes a bit of a bore and a drag on the film.

The flaws in this film extend beyond length and dialogue. There are structural choices that undermine rather than bolster tension. One of Tarantino’s strengths is structure. Pulp Fiction is a master class in revealing missing information for maximum narrative effect. Tarantino did it several times in Inglourious Basterds. Who can forget the “three fingers” moment in the bar? Again, we know that Tarantino can do these things right, so it’s frustrating to see him miss the target.

Spoiler: Example of how a simple editing decision hobbles a Django scene and boosts a Basterds scene

In the opening scene of Basterds, Nazi Colonel Hans Landa interrogates M. LaPadite about a missing family of Jews, the Dreyfuses. Halfway through the interrogation, M. LaPadite denies knowing where the Dreyfuses are while the camera slowly tracks down under his and Landa’s feet, where the family lies in silent terror. Until this point, we aren’t sure whether LaPadite knows anything about the Dreyfuses, but now we see what sort of man LaPadite is and the danger he’s in. Tarantino waits to reveal the location of the Dreyfuses until he knows it will crank the already-high tension to unbearable levels.

A similar opportunity is missed in Django Unchained. After Schultz and Django leave Big Daddy’s (Don Johnson) plantation, we cut to a night scene and a close-up on the wobbling wooden tooth atop Schultz’ wagon. A pair of hands open a concealed hatch in the tooth, extract some papers, and insert a bundle of dynamite. Right away, we know that a trap’s being set for someone. We’re then treated to what is admittedly a great scene by a posse of nascent Ku Klux Klan members and then a shot of Schultz and Django hidden in a spot overlooking the wagon. The audience knows that Schultz and Django have tricked the posse and we’re waiting for the bumbling racists to get their comeuppance. It’s one thing to telegraph the ambush by showing our heroes setting up with their rifles. We can savor the anticipation of seeing the posse (and Big Daddy) brought down by sniper fire. Adding dynamite to the situation ups the stakes considerably, but we see it at the start of the sequence, rather than later when it might have more impact. It’s a wasted opportunity and symptomatic of the problems in Django Unchained.

It’s not that Tarantino has made a bad movie. Django Unchained is a good film, but a “lesser Tarantino.” For every moment of flat dialogue, cartoonish gore, or slack editing, there are great scenes where Tarantino gets things exactly right. Ultimately, it’s that mix of good and bad that keeps Django Unchained from greatness. If you’re making a pastiche of little-seen B-movies like Django and Mandingo, there’s little margin for error. If the audience can’t spot what you’re imitating, they won’t give you the benefit of the doubt if a moment doesn’t feel right . If the audience doesn’t love the films you’re riffing on, they won’t have much patience for nearly three hours of gleeful rhapsodizing. A director can bridge that gap with compelling scenes and moments, but there aren’t quite enough in Django Unchained. The result is a film that succeeds, but could have soared if it wasn’t trying so hard to prove how clever it is.

How do you make a thriller when everyone knows your ending? A jaded moviegoer calls this a trick question. “Everyone knows how a thriller’s going to end,” he sniffs. “The good guys persevere and win the day after a difficult struggle and at considerable personal cost.” Fair enough, but that’s a superficial response to the question. That’s how most movies end. A thriller sets the stakes of its ending higher than most other movies. It’s not whether the guy will get the girl, it’s whether he’ll get her to a minimum safe distance after disarming the bomb strapped to her chest as the pilot of the 747 they’re flying in has a heart attack. So when you bill your movie as the story of the “greatest manhunt in history,” you need to deliver one hell of an ending.

On a technical level, Kathryn Bigelow (Oscar-winning director of The Hurt Locker) pays off the big promise of Zero Dark Thirty’s premise. She films and edits the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound with a smooth blend of admirable low-light cinematography and the flat, green luminance of military night-vision (as someone familiar with the look of night-vision, I appreciated the accuracy of the compromised clarity and depth of view of the night-vision shots). Greig Frasier, the cinematographer, shot those scenes using only the ambient light of a moonless night, the cinematic equivalent of painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with just a gallon of paint. Given more light to work with, the film’s Asian scenes are dusty, bright, a little washed out. When we transition back to Langley, it’s cool, flouresecent blues. A couple of the opening scenes involving torture feature great lighting choices, including an interrogation illuminated by a single, off-set floodlamp and a couple of characters exiting the room into blinding sunlight as though passing into Heaven. Handheld camerawork dominates the film, adding immediacy without distracting or disorienting the viewer. Bigelow demonstrates the same disciplined, handheld sensibility we saw in The Hurt Locker. Hovering close-ups and quick cuts build suspense in a few scenes that can’t quite generate it thorugh story alone.

And that’s part of what unsettles you as you watch Zero Dark Thirty. This film walks like a thriller, and sounds like a thriller, so why isn’t it, well, thrilling? Because we know how the story ends. SEAL Team Six fly in stealth helicopters to bin Laden’s compound and take everyone down with, frankly, mimimal fuss. So, if we know the ending, what does that do for the first two hours of this movie? Zero Dark Thirty focuses the story of the bin Landen manhunt through Maya (Jessica Chastain), a reckless, obsessed CIA analyst who dedicates her life to the search. She’s a brilliant loner, distrusted by her superiors and colleagues but given wide latitude because she gets results. If that sounds like Sergeant First Class William James, the protagonist of The Hurt Locker, then you have a clue about the mood and feel of Zero Dark Thirty. Sidelined for an unpopular strategy for finding bin Laden, she doubles down on every break she gets, pushing all of her chips into the pot on every hand. Chastain deserves all the praise she gets for this performance. Her transformation from coltish recruit to warhorse veteran plays out in simmering silences and steely outbursts. Strong performances by Jason Clarke, as the CIA interrogator who initiates Maya in the dark arts of “enhanced interrogation techniques”, and Mark Strong, playing the CIA veteran who champions Maya’s theories, provide the contrast that allow us to track Maya’s maturation into a first-class manhunter.

Maya’s a clever investigator, putting together clues based on phone intercepts, informant tips and, the gold standard of intelligence in the War on Terror, detainee interrogations. She scours videotapes, travels for face-to-face interviews, scrutinizes satellite photos, and does all he other things we expect in a procedural. But as Maya closes in on her target, the inevitability of her search nags in the back of your mind. Bigelow crafts solid search and chase sequences in Pakistani markets, but these sequences don’t involve Maya, the only character we have a connection with. Maya’s an analyst and so Bigelow sensibly doesn’t put her in cars chasing suspects. What that leaves us, though, is scenes with Maya in an espionage kabuki dance, uncovering clues and getting breaks that we know are inevitable. Zero Dark Thirty feels less like a procedural and more like a documentary, albeit an exciting one.

So where does that leave this film? It’s not a great thriller or procedural and it flirts with being a documentary. As I left the theater, I wasn’t sure what to think. But calling Zero Dark Thirty a documentary gets you halfway to what makes it a good film. Maya’s journey is the backbone of this film and what anchors it. Zero Dark Thirty is a character study, an examination of a talented woman’s single-minded pursuit of her target. We witness Maya’s victories and defeats as she prosecutes her one-woman War on Terror. She’s completely isolated, both physically in Pakistan and emotionally from her colleagues. When the camera turns away from Maya, you feel distracted and anxious until she returns. Maya’s intensity is what we identify with, the only real source of electricity in the film. The way that Maya is bent and shaped by her obsession is what engages you. It feels like a dramatized documentary, a true story told with some artistic license. Unfortunately, Bigelow distracts us from Maya’s story with thriller elements that don’t sit comfortably with the rest of the story, including the raid climax that, while undeniably well-constructed, takes us away from Maya for almost thirty minutes.

The journalistic impulses of Bigelow and the screenwriter, Mark Boal, hamstring what’s most engaging about Zero Dark Thirty: Maya’s journey. In an effort to provide a complete picture of the chase for bin Laden, they include far too much. However, those same impulses deliver the other half of what makes Zero Dark Thirty a good, but not great, film. Maya sees the full breadth of the War on Terror, from the early interrogations of 2002 through last year’s killing of Osama bin Laden. Through her, Bigelow and Boal confront us with the actions taken in our name in pursuit of terrorists. Maya takes those borderline actions and makes those ethically gray decisions that have arguably brought us to this point. She’s the only thing we have to hold onto in the film and she’s forcing us to examine the sacrifices we’ve made. She succeeds, and so do we, but at what cost? Zero Dark Thirty lures its audience into these larger questions using Maya as bait. The same story and the same effect could have been made more directly if Bigelow had jettisoned the pretense that she was making a thriller. Had the raid been more Patriot Games and less Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, it might have served Maya’s story (and the film) better. If Bigelow had more confidence in the strength of Maya’s story, it would be easier to see the good film hiding behind SEAL shooters in the dead of night.

Joe Sunday is a mean son of a bitch. Thug, enforcer, murderer, he and his partner, Julio, bloody their hands for an L.A. crime boss. A local bartender calls Joe about Julio, who’s acting weird at the bar. Shortly after Joe gets to the bar, Julio flips out, tries to kill the bartender. Joe pulls Julio off and they scuffle, Joe with a small knife , Julio with a broken tequila bottle. Before they can really get into it, Julio gouges his own neck with the broken bottle, nearly decapitating himself.

All of that happens in the first four pages of City of the Lost.

Stephen Blackmoore is not fucking around in this book. It’s his debut novel and it’s one of Kirkus’ Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of 2012. City of the Lost is pure-grade noir, from the twists and betrayals to the fluid morality to the femme fatale. Neither our anti-hero, Joe Sunday, nor any of the criminals or monsters he meets is the sucker at the poker table. A strange, egg-shaped stone is the McGuffin that turns the plot’s engine over and over. The quips, banter, and patter between Sunday and his acquaintances buzz like bullets humming past your ear. When Joe tangles with the femme, the dialogue swerves into a hard-edged screwball comedy. The roots and bones of Blackmoore’s story are pure genre, but I mean that as praise.

It’s one thing to ape genre, to loosely sketch it out of laziness or ineptitude. Blackmoore does neither. He writes in short, staccato sentences, often in sentence fragments. City of the Lost is told from Joe Sunday’s perspective, an uneducated, clever man who knows L.A. like a cop. It takes discipline to maintain such a strong, clear voice. There are moments when Blackmoore can’t help himself, let’s a little of his own literary education fall out of Joe’s mouth. An occasional slip, but it reminds you of how well he’s pulling this thing off. Craftsmanship like Blackmoore’s should be admired and recognized. We read genre novels in part because we want the writer to hit certain beats. Noir is a well-worn path, so what’s a writer who loves it to do? He tries his best to honor the genre, but with a fresh coat of paint. What’s clever about City of the Lost is that by satisfyingly checks all of the noir boxes, it makes the reader comfortable (and receptive) for one hell of a twist.

That McGuffin? The stone? It’s a magical talisman that’s used to turn our guy, Joe Sunday, into a zombie. Not a shambling, gore-draped zombie, though. Well, not all the time. Blackmoore doesn’t go easy on Sunday. Our thug looks somewhat normal (if pale and chilly) as long has he keeps himself fed every once in a while. With that knife in the back, Blackmoore propels Sunday through the story, looking for someone who can use the stone to reverse the curse. Stephen takes care to explore the implications of an enforcer who can’t feel pain and heals from virtually any injury. There’s a wider, hidden supernatural scene in L.A. and while he gives the reader enough metaphysical explanations to get by, I wish Blackmoore had spent a little more time fleshing out the rules of his magical world. Keeping things vague allows the story to keep its relentless pace, but I know that he could have (and maybe has) created some interesting metaphysics to get his characters into more trouble.

City of the Lost grabs the back of your jacket and hustles you through L.A.’s supernatural underbelly. Double-crosses pile up as you criss-cross the city with Joe. The chapters are short and merciless, building momentum until it’s 2:00am and you finally exhale after a wild, wild ride. It’s a grisly book, Chandler mixed with George Romero. You turn the last page, reach over to turn off your bedside light, and catch a reflection of your maniacal grin in the framed photo of your wife.

This is the story of a timid homebody of a hobbit named Baggins who lives in Bag End in The Shire. An old, gray wizard appears on his doorstep and draws him into an adventure far from this hobbit’s comfortable hole in the ground. Baggins and Gandalf are accompanied in their adventures by a group of companions, visiting the elven city of Rivendell on their way east. We have a tense scene at Weathertop. The companions face dangerous weather (and more) in a treacherous mountain crossing. Beneath a mountain, they fight goblins and narrowly escape with their lives. All the while, orcs are on our heroes’ trail, culminating in a battle at the end of the film. You’ve already figured out the twist here, haven’t you?

The Fellowship of the Ring and The Hobbit share more than just familiar scenes. Both were released as the acknowledged start of a trilogy, even if stretching The Hobbit’s 250 page length to three films feels more indulgent than condensing The Lord of the Rings‘ 1,000 pages. They had to set expectations for the two films to come while also being full and satisfying movies in their own right. If the first film falls short, the director can mollify critics and fans with assurances that perceived shortcomings will evaporate once the trilogy is seen in its entirety. The Fellowship of the Ring and Peter Jackson (director of that film and The Hobbit) avoided that particular defense of his film by making Fellowship a good movie, full stop. The Hobbit feels like it’s leaning on the “trilogy defense” more than Fellowship did, but just a little bit.

The broad strokes of Bilbo Baggins’ story, which lie at the heart of The Hobbit, echo the story of Frodo Baggins (maybe it’s the other way around, given The Hobbit‘s timeline?). Gandalf the Gray (Ian McKellan) visits Bilbo (Martin Freeman) at his home in The Shire and snares him in an adventure involving a company of dwarves seeking to reclaim their ancestral kingdom from the evil dragon, Smaug. The dwarves are led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richart Armitage, unwittingly doing an incredible impression of Sean Bean as Boromir in Fellowship), the exiled prince of the kingdom who seeks to reclaim the abandoned throne. Armed with a map and key provided by Gandalf, the dwarves set off east from The Shire on the road to adventure. It’s a story about the importance of home as a foundation in our lives and of leaving the safety of home to mature and grow. It’s not the only character arc in the movie (there’s a smaller one related to Thorin overcoming his wounded dwarvish pride and arrogance), but it’s the best one. Freeman’s performance is quietly charming, immediately bringing us onboard with Bilbo’s transformaton from priggy fussbucket to burgeoning (if still cautious) adventurer.

We expect Bilbo to have the best, most interesting arc. The film’s title is The Hobbit and he’s the only one in the story. But the fact that Jackson also emphasizes Thorin’s rote story of overcoming pride highlights the central problem of The Hobbit: too much padding. It’s been a long while since I read the source material and it’s possible that Thorin’s struggle is prominent in Tolkien’s story. But even Bilbo’s story, the central story, is often put aside for quite a while in this film’s neary three hour runtime. Do we need to build up Thorin’s story as much as we do? We very well might. He’s the exiled prince and the leader of the motley band of dwarves. What’s more, his story is essentially Aragorn’s, which invites another comparison to Fellowship. This can be chalked up to Tolkie, but it was Jackson’s decision to emphasize it like he did Aragorn. If we do need a strong Thorin story, then why not trim somewhere else? The term “trim” is misleading, though, since we’re dealing with a 250 page story being stretched, not a 1,000 page story being compressed.

Some of Jackson’s choices acknowledge that he does need to compress certain things. He sensibly doesn’t try to give each of the thirteen dwarves a strong distinct personality. Others suggest this is a flaw, but it’s very much a strength. Even with the excellent, distinctive character design for each dwarf, Jackson knows that audiences will struggle to keep them straight. Tolkien does The Hobbit no favors with the dwarves names (e.g., Ori, Nori, and Dori). Certain dwarves like Balin (Ken Stott), Dwalin (Graham McTavish), and Bofur (James Nesbitt) are more important at this point in the story. These are broad characters, easily remembered by their quirks, but serviceable and compentently portrayed by the actors.

But Jackson’s sensible decision regarding the dwarves only serves to enable his questionable choices to embellish Tolkien’s core story. Gandalf and other magically aware characters spend several scenes discussing a “creeping Shadow” (you can hear the capital “S”) moving across the land. The incidents in the film are re-cast as ominous portents of the coming darkness, rather than a normal part of travelling a dangerous, fantastic world filled with trolls, orcs, and giant spiders. Jackson stirs in some of The Lord of the Rings‘ apocalyptic doomsaying and it clashes with the lighthearted, comedic tone of the rest of The Hobbit. The tone of the film swings from nearly slapstick to ominous and back. Gandalf himself encapsulates this tonal seesawing. In The Lord of the Rings, he’s a wise, powerful figure who knows better than anyone else what’s at stake. The Hobbit‘s Gandalf, in keeping with the source material, is more of a shaggy, grumpy castabout who smokes a lot of “pipeweed.” But Jackson can’t resist putting Gandalf into serious conversations about The Enemy in which he worries and frets over the growing doom. Ian McKellan does his best with the character, but the two Gandalfs amplify the tonal disharmony.

If the tone of The Hobbit is off, it creates a subtle sense of unease in the audience. Our confidence in the film trickles away. You wouldn’t think that The Hobbit needs this confidence. It’s a sequel to the greatest fantasy trilogy in film history. The audience wants nothing more than to wallow in Middle Earth for three hours. To a certain extent, that’s right and The Hobbit delivers for those fans. But The Hobbit is primarily an adventure movie and adventure movies rely heavily on the audience’s confidence.

The spine of any adventure movie is a string of frying pan/fire incidents. Think Raiders of the Lost Ark. The key is that the fire has to be either (a) believable and foreseeable, even if only in hindsight or (b) so outrageously cool that the audience forgives the lack of foreseeability. There’s an experimental Nazi war plane in the middle of the Egyptian desert after Indy escapes the temple full of snakes? Not likely, but how cool is it? Completely cool, so let’s get over there so that Indy can lure some Nazis into some propeller blades. Unfortunately, action set pieces and moments of The Hobbit fail this test. The moments in the film feel loosely connected at best, held together only by the fact that they’re happening to the same characters as they travel east. The characters wander a dangerous wilderness and dangerous things are bound to happen in a dangerous wilderness, right? Stories are about conflict, so let’s throw some in so that things don’t go too smoothly. A fight with orcs is vaguely foreshadowed, and therefore believable when it occurs, but other sequences feel arbitrary. I know that this is how it happens in the book, but Jackson showed good sense for dramatizing The Lord of the Rings for film and should have done the same here.

Frustratingly, Jackson gets this right in Fellowship, but wrong in The Hobbit.

In the Mines of Moria sequence of Fellowship, Jackson properly sets the audiences expectations for the entire sequence. As the Fellowship travels through the Mines, Gandalf warns of how dangerous the goblins are. There’s a small fight in the dwarven king’s tomb with a cave troll, establishing that these goblins are no joke. Then we see swarms of goblins surround the heroes (unexpected, but believable) and then we get The Balrog (unforeseeable, but outrageously cool). Our heroes escape in part through a risky, but believable, jump across a broken stairway. He sets up the presence and danger of the goblins so when they start to pop up around every turn, we, the audience, trust Jackson

Jackson has forgotten that he knows how to do this with the Goblin Town sequence. We have no inkling in the story that the goblins are in the mountains or that the company are in goblin territory. Suddenly, trap doors open the heroes are dumped into a massive underground goblin city. Are these goblins tough like the ones in Moria? Who knows, since all they do is hustle the heroes to the Great Goblin (who is no Balrog on the Outrageously Cool scale) and cower. When the fighting starts, they’re pushovers and so is the Great Goblin. In the finale, our heroes surf some wreckage to the bottom of a chasm and then somehow find their way to a tunnel leading outside. There’s no warning that we’re suddenly going to see goblins and suddenly we’re spending fifteen minutes in their town. It feels like someone making the story up as they go along, which rarely inspires confidence. It’s frustrating and lazy.

At this point, it seems like I’m down on The Hobbit. It has plenty of flaws, but Jackson hasn’t quite lost the old magic. If you like wallowing in Middle Earth as if it were a travelogue rather than a film (and I do), then there’s plenty to like. The same fetishistic attention to detail that gave The Lord of the Rings its powerful sense of reality is in The Hobbit. The dwarves, elves, trolls, goblins, and orcs are expertly designed and realized, thanks to the make-up, costume, and production designers. The CGI characters in particular look incredible (especially in 48fps. More on the 24fps v. 48fps versions of The Hobbit here). Beautiful weapons and armor and painstaking set decoration bring back that sense of archeological believability we felt in The Lord of the Rings, like we’re watching an impossible documentary.

And it’s not as though Bilbo’s story isn’t competently told. It is, even if it’s hard to notice amongst everything else that Jackson crams into a film and a world that Jackson clearly loves. And that’s really the root of the problem. Jackson loves Middle Earth and Tolkien so much that he nearly squeezes it to death. His fanatical enthusiasm allows him to fill the movie to overflowing long after we put our hand up to indicate we’re full. It’s short-sighted to suggest that Jackson hasn’t thought his trilogy through, even if his thoughts (and enthusiasm) have led him astray. Many critics love The Lord of the Rings and praise him for re-arranging those books in a way that makes dramatic, cinematic sense. We should give him the benefit of the doubt with The Hobbit and maybe that’s why praise of the film has been mixed. Jackson ended Fellowship on a strong note, a natural and dramatic turning point. The Hobbit ends on a flat note, but with the promise of great things to come. At worst, The Hobbit will be the worst of film in the trilogy and, if that’s the case, the worst is still pretty good.

This photo’s also from the Met, taken on the same day as the “Game of Thrones” photo elsewhere in this gallery. I won’t repeat the story of how I came to be at the Met that day. This photo is a favorite because of how I processed it.

By the time I took this photo, I’d had Lightroom 3 for more than a year. I fiddled with its surface features, but avoided a deep plunge. I’d bought a very technical book endorsed by Adobe, but it was dry as dust. Sliders, buttons, and settings were explained in fetishistic style masquerading as conversational. The book gathered dust and continues to do so. On a whim, I bought a book by David duChemin (no relation) called Vision and Voice: Refining Your Vision in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. DuChemin’s book was a thunderbolt. His approach was truly conversational and, most importantly, practical. He selected twenty of his own photos and made them available on his website. Each of those twenty photos was an exercise in the book. He walked through every step he used to make the final image and I followed along in Lightroom. It tore the scales from my eyes.

This photo was the first that benefitted from my exposure to duChemin’s book. Rather than using a straight black-and-white conversion, I added an orange tone to the highlights and a blue tone to the shadows, creating this look that (as Dave said) is much more interesting than straight sepia. I followed his advice about tweaking the color channels after converting to black-and-white, too. This was the first time that I felt in control of Lightroom. I felt like I could pull hidden magic from my photos.

I’m more confident behind the camera now. I can look at a photo I just took and imagine the Lightroom tweaks that might improve or even salvage it. It’s not much of a milestone, but I’ll take it.

Like you, my first exposure to Hindu deities was through TSR’s Deities and Demigods, a supplement for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons published in 1980. Mixed in with Thor, Zeus, and Cthulhu, the Hindu gods seemed exotic with their many faces and arms (well, maybe they shared a certain something with Cthulhu). As a Canadian (American!) boy, I was more familiar with the Greek and Norse gods and didn’t feel much of a connection to Vishnu or Agni. We never played any games of D&D based on Indian culture or Hinduism, so Shiva and company remained as a few pages of mild interest in a beloved D&D book.

Although I didn’t realize it until much later, putting Hindu gods into a game book alongside other “mythological” divinities like Osiris and Nyarlathotep (look him up, kids) was a questionable choice by TSR. To this day, these gods are worshipped in India and around the world by a billion people. I didn’t see any stats for Jesus, Moses, or Mohammed in Deities and Demigods. What the fuck, TSR?

Years later, I’d developed a passing interest in Eastern cultures and religions. Familiar names and images stuck out of the books I read. “Oh, yeah, Shiva!” I thought. “His Armor Class is -4, he gets four attacks per round, and cast spells as a 12th level cleric and a 14th-level magic-user. He’s a badass.” To TSR’s credit, the basic contours of each deity also rang a faint temple bell. Vayu was the god of wind and Krishna was an avatar of Vishnu. As I kept reading, I inevitably began to see mentions of the Ramayana.

The Ramayana is one of the central texts of Hinduism. It’s a long, epic story that might (very roughly) analogized to the Torah, Bible, and Koran all rolled up into one. Along with the Mahabharata, it’s a core text of Hinduism. But unlike the Bible, the Ramayana is, in many ways, a kick-ass adventure story. It might be closer to The Odyssey in terms of entertainment and action. It’s the story of a demon, Ravana, who rises to power and casts a shadow over the land. Vishnu, the Hindu god of preservation, sees the danger posed by the demon and reincarnates on Earth as Rama, a blue-skinned hero destined to defeat Ravana. Rama falls in love with Sita, a beautiful princess, and together with Rama’s brother, Lakshman, the three of them are exiled from Rama’s kingdom and travel across India on a path to confront Ravana. Along the way, Rama meets several allies, including Hanuman, the monkey god who becomes an important ally.

The Ramayana may be India’s three thousand year old prequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark, but you haven’t exactly rushed out to read it yet, have you? Maybe it’s because you’ve never seen it like this:

Ramayana: Divine Loophole is the passion project of Sanjay Patel, an animator at Pixar. In the book’s acknowledgements, Patel writes that for four years, when asked what he’d done the night before or over the weekend, he replied that he’d been “working on his book.” Authors often say that they slaved over their books. Sometimes when you finish an underwhelming book, you wonder how your understanding of “slaved” could be so much different than theirs.

In the case of Ramayana: Divine Loophole, Patel turns the question around onto the reader. This book thrums with quality and care. Each page practically vibrates with color, detail, and imagination. Patel’s style is often described as “pop-art”. I know that’s not a criticism, but it feels slight to me. Each page of this book is dense with detail, but so balanced and composed that each seems weightless. Turn each page and you feel a little twinge of vertigo. Patel’s illustrations draw you in, as if they have a slightly stronger gravitational pull than the Earth. Your attention is repeatedly rewarded as delightful details and symmetries reveal themselves. If you’ve ever seen photos of Hindu temples, there are similar echoes in Patel’s art. There’s a similar feeling of elaborate detail that steps to the edge of overwhelming the viewer without stepping over.

And the colors. The images you see here are faint reproductions in the truest sense. The books heavy, glossy pages show wonderfully saturated colors, flawless color gradients, and pinpoint details to their best effect. Read this book in sunshine and you will never regret the warm pleasure of your eyes bursting from their sockets. I should emphasize that it’s not sheer brightness that makes the colors so glorious. Patel shows exquisite, almost preternatural, taste for complementary colors. His ease and confidence with colors wraps you tightly in the story of Rama, draws you more tightly to the narrative. Each page of Ramayana: Divine Loophole also features a few paragraphs of text that tell the story of the Ramayana. This text is often a faint shade of orange, purple, green, or any other color that suits the page. The text never intrudes and often seems to complement the illustrations.

Through this combination of images and text, Patel relays a stripped-down version of the Ramayana. The actual Hindu text is not just an adventure tale, but also a spiritual guide for how to live. Patel wisely understands that people with a casual interest in Hinduism or the Ramayana just want to hear the exciting bits and that’s what he delivers. The tone of the text is modern, conversational, as if Patel is telling you the story first-hand from memory. There are lyrical flourishes in places, but also some fourth-wall-breaking asides that keep things brisk. Patel confesses in the book’s introduction that he “loves books, but hates reading them.” His writing suggests he’s writing for people like him who just want to hear the “good bits.” In combination with the deceptively simple illustrations, his writing voice doesn’t detract from the book’s fun.

And this book really is fun. It is an adventure story with princes, princesses, flying monkeys, demons, epic battles, and magic. It conveys lessons about honor, duty, integrity, and friendship. In short, it’s a perfect book for children. There are brief moments of dark violence (and a few images from Patel of cartoonish gore), but all good fables have that. You don’t need to be a practicing Hindu in order to admire these characters and the lessons they teach. Patel does a remarkable job in bringing this story to life for children (and adults) by abridging the story of Rama and Sita and elevating it with jaw-dropping imagery. This is quite simply the best children’s book I’ve ever seen.

My first big lens purchase was the EF 24mm-105mm F4L IS USM. It’s a pro lens, which the price alone will tell you. I’d been working with the “kit” lens (18mm-55mm F3.5-5.6) and the results were fine. Stepping up to the 24-105 lens felt like putting on the big-boy pants. I had much greater versatility and the photos were sharper. The ability to keep the lens stopped at F4 while zoomed out to 105mm created interesting possibilities.

My first big photo-trip with the new lens was to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. I spent the entire day there, experimenting with the lens and the lighting conditions. My goal was (and continues to be) to focus on smaller compositions. Too often, I capture images that are overly inclusive. I favor the macro over the micro. During the trip to the Met (full series is available through my Flickr stream), I tried to capture detail.

I nearly walked past this chess set in a hallway leading to the Met’s cafe. At first, it was just the chess set itself that caught my eye. Then, I squatted down to change my perspective and started to think about how I might capture this. Here’s where the new lens’ zoom opened new possibilities. I pushed the zoom in and out, experimenting with different frames. It was one of the first times that I composed the shot in my head and then took it. I took a few shots to make sure that at least one had proper focus, then moved on. Even in camera, I was thrilled with the shot. After applying some Lightroom wizardry, I had a shot that’s still in my Top Ten.

I try to modulate my expectations for movies that I’m keen to see. I avoid seeing multiple trailers with new footage. If I vaguely suspect that I’m reading something that might give me new information (not spoilers), I stop reading immediately. Links are scrutinized and probabilities are calculated before I click on them. I deployed all of these skills in advance of seeing The Dark Knight Rises.

I consider The Dark Knight to be one of the finest films of the last decade in any genre and at any scale. It thrums with theme and engages with powerful ideas in ways that Nolan is frequently credited, but doesn’t always actually deliver. Because of the esteem in which I hold The Dark Knight, it was imperative that I keep a lid on my excitement for The Dark Knight Rises. Between these films, Nolan released Inception, a movie I adore despite its flaws. A firm grip was required to keep any sort of objectivity when the new film started. But outside Manhattan’s only IMAX theater, as J. and I sat on carpeted stairs, I started to let my excitement out of its box a little. Let’s be clear about where my allegiances lie in the Eternal Question: I’m Team Kal-El, not Team Bruce. But I like Nolan’s take on Batman and, after two films that redefined what a superhero movie could be, I felt secretly sure that Nolan was going to deliver.

So when The Dark Knight Rises failed to deliver on so many fronts, I was disappointed. I spent much of the running time irritated by one misstep or another. When fun moments of action or dialogue occurred, my grumpiness pushed them away. It felt as though the death of Heath Ledger derailed Nolan’s plans for the third movie and he didn’t much care to finish the trilogy with a different movie than the one he’d planned. He reached back to Batman Begins, dusted it off, and remade it. Universal flew through a lot of flak for rebooting Spider-Man so soon. I’m surprised more people aren’t on Nolan’s case for “self-plagiarizing.”

WARNING: MANY (MAYBE ALL OF THE) SPOILERS AHEAD

I can’t discuss what disappointed me about this movie without discussing it in detail. If you are the type who cares about not having movies spoiled, bookmark this page and come back once you’ve seen it. If spoilers don’t bother you, we can’t be friends. Ever.

Batman Begins, you say? Self-plagiarism? Think back to the basic plot of that movie. There’s a secret society of assassins, called “The League of Shadows”, that wants to destroy Gotham because they perceive it as wicked. “We sacked Rome, loaded trade ships with plauge rats, burned London to the ground,” says Ras al Ghul, the League’s, er, leader and Batman’s martial mentor. The assassins steal a secret Wayne Industries prototype of a microwave emitter that vaporizes water with plans to turn it against Gotham. The Dark Knight Returns also features a secret Wayne Industries prototype that the villains will use to threaten Gotham, this time with a little more success. What villains, you ask? The League of Shadows. The same secret society of assassins that Batman sent packing in Batman Begins. Nothing wrong with that, in theory. It links the third movie in the trilogy with the first, providing a grander sense of narrative. So now, the League of Shadows, a fanatical organization that for centuries has stood for the principle that they alone must work in to rid human civilization of corruption is going to wipe this modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah from the map.

Except Gotham isn’t a corrupt city anymore. In the first ten minutes of The Dark Knight Rises, secondary characters like Captain Foley (a cop played by Mathew Modine) and the mayor (Nestor Carbonell) explain to the audience that Gotham is now a peaceful city. Thanks to the Harvey Dent Act, the city’s police used expanded powers to clean up Gotham pretty well. It’s a post-Guliani Gotham. Nolan certainly doesn’t show us types of corruption and lawlessness that we saw in Batman Begins, the decadence that pushed the League of Shadows to consider destroying the entire city. Throughout the rest of the movie, Nolan doesn’t show us any city corruption that might make us believe that, after more than a decade, the League of Shadows still considers Gotham a legitimate target for their wrath. We’ve got sketchy allusions to the anger of Occupy Wall Street, but where’s the corruption that the League is sworn to destroy? Without re-establishing the League’s stated motivations and purpose, it weakens the movie’s primary antagonists both in The Dark Knight Rises andBatman Begins. Nolan retroactively damages his first Batman film.

So why, in fact, is the League of Shadows in town? Because Talia al Ghul wants revenge. She wants to finish the job that her father, Rhas al Ghul, started. This twist pulled a gasp from the audience I sat with, but I shook my head. Were we given any clue, any hint, that Miranda Tate was Talia al Ghul? Maybe the clues are there, but I was paying close attention and didn’t spot them. Until that point, we’ve had over two hours of knowing that Bane was the villain. Miranda Tate’s storyline, like so many others in this movie, was a disposable distraction in the first hour. Now we learn that the child who escaped from the prison was Miranda, not Bane. But what does that twist mean for the actual movie? Does it advance any of the film’s threadbare themes or reveal a new and interesting take on the story we’ve already seen? Nope. It’s a twist for its own sake, a lazy gimmick. So we’ve got a gimmicky antagonist whose motivations are both rudimentary (“Revenge!”) and contradictory (Gotham isn’t corrupt anymore). Put this up against the Joker’s grand visions and schemes in The Dark Knight and I cringe.

The decisions Nolan made in telling this story are clumsy and muddled. Let’s talk about Bane himself (Tom Hardy, doing his level best), the movie’s erstwhile antagonist. In the film’s opening air-jacking sequence, Bane tells us that it would be very painful to him if his mask was removed. That’s got to be tough for the guy, since it gives him the most distinctive masked-guy voice since Darth Vader. Why is Bane wearing this mask? It’s got tubes that, presumably, release a gas that keeps him alive or happy or pain-free. Apart from the character’s size, it’s the most distinctive thing about him. Do we ever find out why he wears the mask? Nope. In their climactic fight, Batman knocks a tube or two loose and Bane doesn’t seem too worse for wear. He still lands flurries of punches on Batman. When Talia betrays Batman with a knife in the ribs, she takes time during her monologue to re-attach the dislodged tubes of Bane’s mask. Why? Nolan doesn’t think it matters enough to tell us. Bane’s mask is reduced to an affectation. In a movie that’s two hours and forty minutes, this is all the time that Nolan wants to spend on this. Was there more to it in the script or in Nolan’s imagination? Maybe, but he seems to have lost track of it or decided that other information was more important. It’s a half-finished thought, which is excellent short-hand for this entire film.

Too many times, Nolan introduces an idea and then forgets it. When we first meet Batman, he’s limping around using a cane. Selina Kyle (the sublime Anne Hathaway) kicks the cane out from under Bruce and he crashes to the ground. Wayne visits his doctor, who tells him that he’s not fit for heli-skiing, let alone fighting crime. OK, I thought to myself, this reminds me of The Dark Knight Returns, a graphic novel that I suspect Nolan struggled mightily to avoid comparisons to. Bruce’s not in fighting shape anymore. His body betrayed him. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. But Bruce’s frailty never comes up again in the film. Before he begins kicking ass in earnest, Bruce puts some sort of enhanced Bat-brace on his knee and we’re left to assume that he’s back in fighting trim. Is it Batman’s physical weakness that leads to defeat and a broken (sprained?) back at the hands of Bane? Nolan gives us no clues. He could have given us a shot of Batman’s knee giving out on him during the fight, a reminder of Batman’s condition that the audience saw earlier in the film. When Bruce is trapped in the movie’s infamous prison, do the men who attend to him also magically restore all of his missing cartilage? How does he climb out of that pit in his condition and without his hi-tech Bat-exoskeleton that he was presumably wearing during the first hour of the movie? It’s almost like Nolan edited the movie in sequence and, like a goldfish, forgot all of the parts of the movie he’d already locked down.

And what happened to the fight choreography? Ask anyone and they’ll tell you that the best fight scene in Batman Begins (and any of the Nolan Batman films) is the shadowy takedown of Scarecrow’s thugs in the basement of Arkham Asylum. Terrified gunmen are yanked into the dark corners of the ceiling, never to return. Batman fights like a ninja, indirectly and from surprise. How does Batman fight in The Dark Knight Rises? Like John Wayne in broad daylight. I’m a staunch opponent of shakey-cam fights with the camera inches from the combatants and edited in half-second cuts. To his credit, Nolan veers away from that for a more traditional approach, but his choreography is stale. I found myself wishing for a little camera movement, a judicious edit or two, instead of clumsy haymakers. In the sewer fight with Bane, Batman just goes straight at him, grunting and screaming like a professional wrestler. That’s Bane’s style, not Batman’s. Where is Batman’s bag of tricks? No Bat-arangs to soften Bane up or to put him off balance? No smoke bombs? Batman is supposed to be one of the smartest fighters around, but he plays to Bane’s strengths with a toe-to-toe exchange of blows. Later, Batman takes on Bane in exactly the same way that got his back broken earlier. During the grand melee in the streets between Bane’s minions and the police, Batman (again, in broad daylight) walks through the crowd to confront Bane mano-a-mano, as if this is a scene from Braveheart. Bane thrashed Batman the last time they fought like this. Why doesn’t Batman lure Bane onto more favorable turf, weaken him, and then get into a fist fight that he might have a chance of winning? How did Batman get better at fighting between his two dust-ups with Bane? Did he visit a different Asian monastery and learn a new technique? No, he languished in a prison for month doing rehab. What’s changed that makes us think that Batman can now beat Bane in a straight-up fight? Nothing. Instead, we see Batman break Bane’s mask, but we, the audience, don’t know why that’s bad because Nolan hasn’t told us. It’s just so unsatisfying and it diminishes Batman’s character.

Never mind Bruce’s fighting smarts, what about his regular smarts? Batman is The World’s Greatest Detective, but do we see any of that? Nope. The story and plot are handed to Bruce on a silver platter. There’s fifteen seconds at the start of the film in which we see the results of Batman’s great abilities as a detective when he shows us Selina Kyle’s real identity. We get nothing else. Batman is supposed to outsmart his foes with the help of technology. In The Dark Knight Rises, he waits passively while events happen and then he reacts to them. It’s so out of character that I wonder if Nolan and his brother (the co-writer) were paying much attention to the script at all.

Why does Nolan no longer seem concerned with creating a world, a Gotham, that’s unique? In the first two movies, primarily shot in Chicago, Nolan wisely relied on a combination of dark locations and CGI backgrounds to create a unique look for Gotham City. The Dark Knight was more obviously shot in Chicago, but Nolan was making an effort. In The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan abandons any sense of artifice. Because so much of the movie occurs in broad daylight, we see wide establishing shots of Manhattan that are familiar from hundreds of other movies we’ve seen. You don’t need to be a New Yorker to spot all of the Manhattan landmarks (but New Yorkers will, unfortunately, spot a ton of them), but you don’t need to be because other movies have burned them into the cinematic unconscious of the moviegoing public. With all of the money at his disposal, Nolan could have created a CGI Gotham for those wide shots. If he was worried that it’d look fake, set those shots at night (“Dark Knight”, remember?) and that’ll help fool the audience. Instead, Nolan sets long scenes on the Queensboro Bridge, puts Wayne Manor across the river from the George Washington Bridge (and my apartment), and figures that the audience, like him, doesn’t care.

I wish I could say that the acting was a bright spot in this movie, but it isn’t. Half of an actor’s performance, good or bad, must be credited to the script, so the Nolan brothers share some of the blame here, too. But Christian Bale seems bored while Michael Caine chews the scenery in an attempt to inject any sort of drama into the movie. Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman are criminally underused, while Mathew Modine is, unfortunately, saddled with a caricature, not a character. Only Anne Hathaway and Joseph Gordon Levitt acquit themselves with any sort of dignity. I’d watch Anne Hathaway read the phone book naked, but I still felt her struggling under creaky dialogue and situations. Joseph Gordon Levitt was this movie’s “Ariadne” (the Ellen Paige role in Inception), serving as the everyman hero that the audience identifies with. Inception was rightly criticized for characters that spoke in exposition rather than dialogue and Nolan appears not to have heard that justified criticism. The only screenwriter who can pull this sort of thing off is David Mamet. Christopher Nolan, you are no David Mamet (when it comes to expository dialogue).

Uneven pacing, unexplored ideas, bungled execution, there’s more to criticize. I’m genuinely baffled by people who claim to like both this movie and The Dark Knight. To my eyes, its as though they were made by two different directors. I can’t shake the feeling that Nolan was completely adrift in the wake of Ledger’s death. I almost believe that Nolan didn’t want to make another Batman movie without the Joker and Ledger. It’s a comforting explanation for the muddled mess that he delivers with The Dark Knight Rises. I’ve referred to this film off-hand as “Prometheus-bad.” I don’t think that The Dark Knight Rises‘ story contains the rank stupidity of Prometheus’ botched tale. Nolan deserves the benefit of the doubt, but The Dark Knight Rises feels supremely unpolished, just like Prometheus. You hear stories about movies that are saved in the editing room. The director shoots a whole ton of footage, orders a slew of special effects, and then sits down with his editor to cobble something together. The Dark Knight Rises feels like Nolan didn’t have the right pieces for a cohesive story and just had to make do with the imperfect scraps he had.

I’ve walked The Highline Park in Manhattan two or three times. It’s an old, elevated rail track that sat derelict and unused for decades after going out of service in the 1980’s. Built in the 1930’s as a way of preventing street congestion, it sat abandoned for years. After a long period of restoration, it’s now the most unique park in Manhattan. It’s a ribbon of wild flowers and grasses, wooden lounge chairs and benches, twisting from 14th Street all the way to 34th.

I took this photo more than a year ago. My DSLR was still very new and shiny to my eyes. I purposely delayed my visit to the Highline that afternoon until sunset. I didn’t know much about photography at the time. I did know about the Golden Hour, though, and I figured that sunset on the west-facing Highline would favor even an amateur like me. I remember struggling to compose interesting images. Nothing captured my interest as I ambled north. I instantly deleted half of my shots right after I took them.

But then I saw the Gehry Building. How could I miss it, illuminated by a soft pink-purple sunset? The buildings around the Gehry show their age and history as former industrial sites. Their bricks are worn and peppered with faded, painted signs of extinct businesses. The Gehry stands apart, with its glass curves and ice-cube exterior. As I checked my camera’s LCD screen after the first shot of the Gehry, I knew I was onto something. I took several more shots, but this is one is the best.